I imagine a poetics which is schematic, diagrammatic, iconographic, fragmentary.
Not a poem but a mythology, each god an icon, a small closed system of thought, a
system lit and inhabited only by you ("you"). The poem as an arrangement of infinities, a
balancing act, a child's mobile hung with suns and set at spinning.

*

When inhabiting a house, entering a cathedral, renting an apartment, occupying a shack,
our lives are reorganized according to laws of art (architectural art). We separate from
one another, we separate the portions of our life from each other, we separate our time
and our interests according to the organizational system around us. We sit in living rooms
alone or on communal pews.

The architectural work is a field of forms arranged in an order (an order imposed on it
by rules). But more importantly, we can see how the subject of the work is not the field
itself, or the forms within it (which are empty), or the order of the forms. The subject of
the house is the person who will enter it.

*

The difference is the difference, however slight, between walking down a familiar
street during the day and walking down the same street, at night, in a dream. In the day,
the images are only the ground for your purpose: say, getting bread from the store. The
meaning of your walk is this and only this, getting bread. But at night, in the dream,
even if you have the same manifest objective ("must get bread"), the images that form
your perambulation are not in service of this objective. They are not things to be idly
stepped over. They are things of import, things full of secret meaning, chosen not to mark
your path but to create it. These things are your objective. If the dream is said to have a
meaning then this meaning is a sum of the things in the dream, the sum of the condensed
and displaced objects projected onto the mind. The images are not concrete, in that they
are not common interests between you and your subconscious (supposed author of the
dream in which you perambulate). They are ciphers, objects invested of hidden import,
mysterious and full of meaning. They do not yield when approached. The little gods and
demons of the imagination.

*

And so the poem can also be seen as an arranged field of forms. These forms are
emptinesses to be filled. The most fundamental form in poetry being something which
has been commonly (and wrongly) called the image. The image is something perceived,
its existence is in perception, and that perception assumes a shared reality, a referent to
which the image in the mind refers. And so the "concrete image" builds, through detail,
a specificity which exists not outside language (some supposed reality) but between
subjects. The reader and author are like two friends on a walk, things appearing in their
realness before them. The two comment and share their experience of these things.

*

But the image is made a poetic image not by detail, which in both the dream and life may
be identical, but by import. The dream-image is arresting, it is jarring, it is a condensed
and metonymic relation to something which is not separate from it (as distinct from a
symbol, which is a stand-in). The dream image does not allow you to idly walk over it.
It isn't a puddle that interrupts your nightly commute. It is a puddle more important than
your commute. A puddle which contains an ocean.

*

The poetic image then is not the end of sight but the beginning of thought, the entrance of
an idea, an idea entirely contained within the image, too concrete to be anything besides
what it is and too abstract to be anything less. The idea must be then identified by its
footprint in the world as the subconscious image must be be identified by its footprint in
the dream. The image does not define the idea. The image imports the idea.
I think of these footprints as icons. The religious icon is a concrete object. It is perceived
in all its infinite details like any other object. But it is also an object of meditation, and its
perception is only important in that it leads into meditation. The details are the entrance
of thought, empty yet specific details, tunnels that draw you down a definite path. So the
icon is a focal-point not for a shared reality but for a process of meaning.

*

But most fascinatingly, every icon is a fragment, a piece of a larger meaning
hinted at through its specifics. Every cross is a fragment, not of the One True Cross, but
of a specific, individual cross, created in the mind.

*

So Burns can say his love's like a red, red rose, and we are not witnessing the
reality of a rose before us but entering into the icon of the rose, a spirit contained in
details: "red," "red," "newly sprung." The icon of June is entered, its warmth a simile
with the lushness of the repeated reds, the icon of "love" being colored with warmth,
idleness, lushness, the sweet smell of flowers. It does not depend on Burns to conceive of
a specific rose. There is no reality to it. We are in a blank field arranged with blank icons
arranged in similes to each other, an imaginary town where red, red roses become love.
Of course, if one has a different conception of red, or roses, or of June, then one runs into
the possibility of ending in a different town than Burns. These, after all, are not objects
but assemblages, and everything is a territory of the other, and the June of the poem is a
fragment of every other June which changes and fluctuates with every reading. All that
remains is the relations. Love like a rose new sprung in June, for any conception of love,
for any conception of rose, for any conception of June.

*

The icon is an anchor of meaning, not its master. And so it is essential that the thoughts in
the poem be our thoughts, that the design be open to us, that the images of the field be not
solid forms but icons, empty yet enclosed spaces for the mind.

*

The poem is an organization and so contains encoded a system, a hierarchy, a
mechanics of forms. These relations are distinct and immutable, a little machine that
cuts and blends and brews and equates. How it attaches, interacts and communes with
other fields is mutable; the components, the ingredients and the purposes are mutable;
the relations are constant. Not a poem but a mythology. Aphrodite marries Hephasteus,
she loves Adonis, she mothers Eros. These relations are important (and difficult), more
important than any supposed meaning that could be derived from them. Hades has stolen
Persephone from Demeter; later scholars will look on this and say it is a meaning for
winter. But no, that is a later meaning, an exegesis on the poem of rape. The poem of
Persephone does not need to mean winter. Winter may mean it.

*

Where, then, is the self, if not diffuse through all of the space of the poem? The
metaphors of selfhood shift and change: we are each and every object in the field, the
tree in the foreground, the man on a quest, the woman waiting, the woman on a quest, the
man waiting. The mountain in the background, the sky. These things are not ourselves.
They become terms for ourselves.

*

But the field! The field is first an absence. What is a field but a space between things
which are? A field in the woods, a field between buildings, a field behind the house, a
magnetic field between poles. It has no qualities but absence, first an emptying, then a
piling-on. If it is a field of something, a field of wheat, a field of grass, it is a something
so full as to become empty. What is in the field of wheat? Not wheat. Wheat has become
background.

What is in the field of wheat but one crow? One crow in the field.
And a field full of crows? A field full of crows would be a murder. The impossibility of
heaven.

*

A poem dated 2002 bore the title "Iconography." It wasn't popular with
magazines, who preferred sly and discursive poems with New York school
bents. "Iconography" was bare and tripartite, only 32 words. But it was the beginning of a
certain process of thought.

Iconography

Rise
like an air
underwater.
Rise
so
unwanted.
The waves have teeth
they chew on the island.
It clings to the surface
spread-fingered.
A man waits for an answer.
A bird returns.

Sometime later I sketched the poem on a piece of paper, because it was a poem that could
be sketched without words on a piece of paper.
It started from the bottom. "Rise / like an air / underwater." An upward arrow, arcing
from the left. The second section had more detail. "The waves have teeth / they chew on
the island." A small landmass with the little lines of water to each side, barely surviving.
Then the third: "A man waits for an answer." The icon of a man, head and a body,
sexless, unshaded. A shadow. "A bird returns." From the island and upward, opposite to
the rising arc of the first section, an arrow, pointing to the possibility of a far-off curve.
How the man is waiting! His island is losing itself every moment. And how this tiny
figure fought to get even there, spat out by an uncaring sea. The island is the form of a
hand pressing down, the gesture of some inner holding-on. How it struggles to steady.
And how that bird returns! From where? So brash and unexpected. And how calmly it
arcs. It returns, it will not stay. The island will disappear. For now, this is what is.
This is a poem where the only content is the relations, relations which can be drawn
without words on a piece of paper. Meaning is alien; I can say this poem means my
whole understanding of icons, that the man on the island is the icon in the field of
the poem, the bird the present-moment self, the water, both time and reality and the
unconscious. Or, the poem is the island and the man the poor self having struggled out
of unconsciousness to consciousness, the self-on-seeing-itself. And the bird then is the
messenger, the angel, of the outside, which we can only glimpse unawares from our tiny
island of presence, soon to sink back to the sea.

I could say these things, but the only content of the poem is the relations.
It's a diagram. An icon for the experience of iconography.